Networks virtualization in the cloud

Networks That Know Virtualization

In Juniper Network’s EBOOK “Networks That Know Virtualization”, we read about why the legacy IT data centers and emerging private and public clouds, virtualization is becoming the norm. Through virtualization, organizations are realizing the benefits of scalability, agility and efficiency.

Those are the heavy upsides, of course, but what about the trade-offs? More specifically, what about the effect on the network? As more of the world becomes virtualized, connecting virtual workloads on the network can present challenges for many legacy network infrastructures.

Virtualization adds more complexity, too
The problem with virtualization is that it doesn’t just add more traffic to the network, it adds more complexity, too. For an organization to fully benefit from a virtualized cloud data center, it requires a network that can keep pace with today’s agile virtual workloads. At the same time, the network needs to be able to serve as the bridge between the increasing number of virtualized resources and the legacy systems that are not yet virtualized. And it is increasingly difficult to do this if the network is a closed and proprietary system that is not open to innovation.

The cloud computing market is similarly fragmented
In today’s competitive enterprise landscape, IT leaders are focused on a range of business imperatives. Featured in manysurveys and focus group, these stakeholders have noted the need for greater cost management, increased mobility, higher application availability and enhanced customer experience.

It’s a daunting list and, in response, many are looking to virtualization and cloud computing models to deliver unprecedented agility in support of these wide-ranging objectives. That’s hardly surprising given the huge growth in the number, type and design of applications spun out by the modern enterprise.

Know your vulnerabilities
Every year, service providers and other enterprises invest heavily in data center compute, storage, applications, services, and management – plus the technologies to connect them all. For those who ignore open standards in these solutions, an unappetizing end is in store – one that involves more cost and complexity than is necessary to piece together the physical and virtual operating environments.